Today’s the day for the Bicycles for Humanity donation drive, collecting bikes for South African villages where they’re urgently needed – and dropoffs start even earlier than the original announcement we published earlier this month. 7:30 am-noon, you can take a bicycle to West Seattle’s Holy Rosary Church to donate. (Other churches in Seattle are collecting later, in case you miss that window.) If you missed the explanation of what it’s about, the news release is ahead:

Often lauded as the bicycle capitol of the U.S. and noted for its collective spirit of generosity, Seattle will host a bike drive this (weekend) to benefit impoverished South African villages in need of medical care and mobility.

This is the first such charity event of the newly formed Bicycles for Humanity – Seattle, a small group Seattleites who last month raised enough money from like-minded locals to ship three containers of donated bicycles to South Africa. The bikes will be donated to medical workers, students and heads of households in the country’s KwaZulu-Natal province.

The group’s challenge now is to find 500 used and serviceable bicycles in Seattle to fill the first container. If successful, this weekend’s bike drive will help deliver the gift of mobility to those in need in South Africa as early as next month.

The genesis of the Seattle chapter of Bicycles for Humanity began when Seattleites Frank and Susan Finneran and several friends and colleagues visited Zulu Nyala Game Park and resort in South Africa last October after purchasing the experience at a charity fundraising event. “When we visited, we were taken by the majesty of the wild animals and the splendor of the jungle, however, we also saw first hand the abject poverty of the area,” said Frank Finneran. “It’s a place of 10 million people with 50 percent unemployment and the highest incidence of HIV in the world – 39 percent of the population.”

The Finnerans and their Seattle friends agreed that something as simple as a bicycle could have an enormous impact on the lives of the people they met and observed in South Africa. Subsequent researched indicated that some 1.5 million usable bicycles are discarded each year in the U.S.

Two months later, the nonprofit Bicycles for Humanity-Seattle was established to procure and donate new and used bikes in working condition to medical workers, students and heads of households in the KwaZulu-Natal province.

“It is our hope that we create a program that attracts sufficient interest from our community that it becomes an ongoing project in Seattle,” said Finneran. He and charity organizers hope to create a strategy to sustain the program. The ultimate goal is to ship two containers of a combined total of 1,000 new and used bicycles to Africa each year.

To learn more about Bicycles for Humanity – Seattle, visit www.b4hs.org

To donate a bike, the public may visit the following drop-off locations:

Sunday, May 23

Holy Rosary Catholic Church
4139 42nd Ave. SW, Seattle
7:30 a.m. to Noon

Immaculate Conception Church
820 18TH Ave., Seattle
8 a.m. to Noon

St. James Cathedral
804 9TH Ave., Seattle
7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church
732 18TH Ave., Seattle
8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.